mHacks Project 2015

In high school, I used to tutor a lot. When I say a lot, I mean 7 to 8 hours a week after school while managing extracurriculars, tennis, and the toils of a magnet high school student. So, when I did work, I wanted to get the most out of my time spent. I knew I was a decent tutor, and I knew that there were kids in my area that needed help, but I found that it was difficult to pair us up. I had to go through major companies that were trusted by parents, but charged $50/hour while I only got paid $12/hour. Obviously, the way out of this would be to ask the parents to just pay me $25 cash, but this was against my contract with the company and could result in a lawsuit. Back to the original problem, why isn't there a way to connect me and the student/parent?

"toot" (name subject to change for obvious reasons) is essentially a social network for parents and tutors. Students like me can get on the website and create a tutoring profile. Here, they can enter all the information parents are looking for: high school, test scores, grades, GPA, etc. The website displays it in an attractive manner using the "skeleton" css layout (http://getskeleton.com). This was not accomplished during my time at MHacks, but ideally the parent would be able to filter through all tutors on the website by location, and eventually by courses taught.

I built this using traditional web dev techniques. Javascipt, HTML, and CSS were all utilized during the process. For the back-end, I used FireBase, as that was hugely promoted at the hackathon itself.

This project posed many, many challenges. I came into this hackathon with practically zero web dev experience (I only knew Java before this). In addition, this was my first hackathon, which was pretty overwhelming. Firebase was not easy to learn, but with the help of a few peers I was able to manage.

I am actually pretty proud of this project. Considering I knew literally nothing before this, the product currently looks pretty nice. Web development is definitely going to become more present in my future, and backend is not nearly as daunting as I thought it would be. I learned a ridiculous amount, and this really got me excited for future hackathons where I hope to learn just as much.

I want to develop this into a finished product. I am going to get the website up and running and tell kids at my high school to use it. Hopefully, you'll be able to see this soon!